Gates and doors for quantum users only
READER Geoff Kirbly sends us a photo of a sign at Southwell Business Park in Portland, Dorset, UK. It says: “NOTICE. This gate must be locked at all times.”
At first, Geoff says, he wondered how access could be possible through a gate that was always locked. Then he recalled Louis de Broglie’s discovery that all bodies have a characteristic wavelength which enables them to engage in quantum tunnelling and quantum diffraction. By either of these mechanisms humans could, in theory at least, pass through the locked gate.
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Geoff is now trying to exploit the de Broglie quantum wavelength of his body to get into his bank’s vault.
Meanwhile, Angela Cotton came across a need for quantum tunnelling while on holiday in Edinburgh, UK. She sends us a photo of a hotel lift bearing the instruction “Please ensure that BOTH doors are CLOSED when entering the lift”.
Philip Bentley had a similar problem after using the toilet in his local hospital in Sussex, UK. A notice pinned to the inside of the sliding door told him: “Please turn off the light and shut the door before leaving”. He managed the first, he says, but, lacking quantum tunnelling abilities, he was left trapped in a pitch-black toilet.
No such difficulties for Graham Marshall. He sends us a photo of what he calls “Schrödinger’s gate” in Lincoln Park, Perth, Australia. A notice on the gate proclaims, mystifyingly: “This gate must be open or shut at all times.” No need for quantum tunnelling there, then.
THE emerging art form of the Amazon-customer review continues to attract new practitioners. On 29 January we asked whether there was any product that has garnered more reviews than the 1242 achieved by “Tuscan Whole Milk”. Several readers immediately alerted us to “” at , which has achieved a record (we suspect) 1896 reviews to date.
Many reviewers attribute greatly increased sexual success to wearing this T-shirt. Others, like Dan Iowwwwi, focus on what a bargain it is: “Most shirts like this only contain one wolf. This shirt has three wolves, plus a moon. You are basically getting three wolves and a moon for the price of one wolf. You won’t find that deal anywhere else.”
Meanwhile, Matthew Thomas points to a “very British” contender in the field. The “” at has reaped a mere 310 reviews so far, but they are coming in fast. I. Aisthorpe, for example, says of this portrait of the British TV presenter: “Yesterday I was a bedridden, drug-addled alcoholic with no hope, no future. Then I bought this. Now I’m a bedridden, drug-addled alcoholic with no hope, no future, but with a 20-inch canvas of Paul Ross. You just never know what lies around the corner.”
OUR items about the translator in Afghanistan who was nonplussed by the word “virus” being used in relation to a person rather than a computer (25 December 2010 and 22 January) inspired Shoshana Marchand to send us an example of a parallel phenomenon.
“Back in the 1970s my youngest sibling, raised entirely in Manhattan, joined the rest of the family for a trip to visit friends in the rural US state of Vermont. He must have been about 5 years old at the time. As evening fell, we went walking down a rutted country lane. My brother stopped dead in his tracks, holding tightly to my hand, and looked straight up at the sky in awe. ‘Wow!’ he breathed in wonderment. ‘It looks just like the planetarium’.”
READER Karen Ashworth’s hairdryer, with its assertion that it leaves hair “moisture rich” (22 January), is not alone in making a marketing claim that is the opposite of its actual purpose, says Steve Randerson. His wife Vicki’s Vidal Sassoon hairdryer is “perhaps even more blatant in its disregard for the needs of those who wish to dry their hair”. He sends us a picture of the dryer, which proudly proclaims on its side that it performs “hair hydration”.
LAST week we reported on a Twitter post by KerryHomeopath that proclaimed: “Your brain is 80 per cent water, you remember stuff. Water has memory. Therefore homeopathy works” (19 February). A colleague directs us to a on the “Quarter to Three” web forum that mockingly employs the same logic: “Your brain uses electricity. The coffee machine uses electricity. Therefore, your brain can grind coffee.”
How far from Australia is that?
FINALLY, thanks to Maggi Boult, who sends a tourism advert which opens: “Iceland is more than halfway round the world for Australians”. But more than halfway is less than halfway, depending which way round you go – unless you are travelling through extra dimensions, perhaps.